The security of Microsoft Windows has been receiving a lot of media coverage lately. It seems everyone is saying that Windows is poorly written and riddled with bugs. The majority are anti-Microsoft and state that running Linux is the only way to be safe and secure.

I checked the list of Linux distributions (found at www.linux.org/dist/list.html) to discover there are currently 258 distributions with 39 listed as unsupported. This means that there is no such solution as "run Linux". With 258 groups, each with their own opinions of what should be in Linux and how things should be developed, where do you do for help when things go wrong? And despite what is often touted things do go wrong even on Linux.

While I use and sell Microsoft products, I am not interested in participating in the operating system holy war that goes on between the Microsoft and Linux advocates. I just want something that works; will be supported by my business application vendors and is centrally manageable when I put it on a network.
Windows XP Professional is just such a product. Microsoft and some third party software vendors provide tools and services...

This was supposed written in response to the Why Windows is a security nightmare article - so you might expect it to at least attempt to address some of the points raised there about the inadequacies of Windows Update, the vulnerability of the Registry and the default setup of unnecessary services like Windows Messenger.

The plugin for Symantec's V2i Protector is singularly ill-judged here also. Imaging software should be used to allow recovery from hard disk failure and similar catastrophes - but cannot provide trojan/virus/worm protection simply because many do not reveal their presence for a time (making it likely that backups will also be affected by the time the user discovers something is amiss).

All in all, an article that does not live to its title - and shows that security professionals have a lot more educating to do.